


it's 2AM and we're alive

by deplore



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: M/M, Modern Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 14:26:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2854154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deplore/pseuds/deplore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Killua and Gon are juniors in high school when Kite goes missing. After it happens, Gon changes quietly, like tectonic plates shifting underneath his skin: unnoticeable, but unspeakably profound, and Killua doesn’t know what else to do but watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's 2AM and we're alive

Killua has always suspected that the first person to kiss him would be Gon, but he’d never thought that he would taste something like bitterness on Gon’s lips when it happened. After a few moments, Gon tilts his mouth away and Killua can feel his cheeks heat up bright red. “What the hell was that,” Killua mutters underneath his breath, incapable of moving his forehead away from where it rests against Gon’s. It takes him a few moments to register that he’s dropped his pencil, and he hasn’t the foggiest what he was writing, but he has a vague recollection of working on a physics assignment together before Gon had leaned over and kissed him.

Gon smiles. “I just felt like it,” he says. “Kissing you, I mean.”

“Do that with a girl,” Killua replies, even as he mentally beats himself up over it: _stupid stupid_ stupid _, why am I such an idiot, I don’t want you to do that at all, I want –_

“But I don’t want to do it with anybody else,” Gon says.

Killua sighs sharply and closes his textbook. “You’re so selfish,” he replies, but he leans back in and kisses back, licking into Gon’s mouth. He tastes bitterness again and wonders – is that the taste of regret swallowed back, or is he just sixteen and looking for meaning in things where there is none?

 

* * *

 

Mito calls his cell phone at 11PM on a Friday night and asks, “Killua? I’m so sorry to bother you, but I haven’t heard from Gon all night. He hasn’t been answering his phone.”

Killua’s been working through SAT prep questions since dinner; he hasn’t seen Gon since the last period of school. “Yeah, he’s at my place, he didn’t tell you?” Killua replies. His heart rate is steady and the casual tone comes easily – how many times has he already done this? He’s lost track. “I bet he left his charger at home again. You wanna talk to him?”

“Oh, no, that’s alright. Sorry to bother you, Killua. You two have a good time. Good night,” Mito says.

“G’night,” Killua echoes. He listens to the dial tone after Mito hangs up for a few seconds before bringing his hand to his forehead and sighing sharply. He turns back to his list of vocabulary words (vacillate inexorable circumspect flagrant vacuous) but finds he can’t quite concentrate on them anymore.

 

* * *

 

Questions Killua doesn’t ask:

  1. Where do you go on the nights Mito ends up calling me?
  2. Did you know that you’re making me lie to her?
  3. Do you kiss other people besides me?
  4. Are you doing this because you think it’s your fault?
  5. No matter what, we’re best friends, right?



He decides that the reason he doesn’t ask is because where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise. The reality is that every time he tries, the words seize up in his throat every time Gon turns to him with a smile and asks, “What is it, Killua?” because it’s too easy to just pretend like nothing ever changed when Gon’s too good at pretending like nothing ever changed.

 

* * *

 

The official details of what happened to Kite are vague. As far as the police are concerned, he is a missing person, but Killua knows Gon thinks he’s dead. He knows this because the night that Kite went missing, Gon ended up on his doorstep at half past two in the morning, shivering and sobbing and Killua’s head went a little blank at the sight of it. “What’s wrong?” he’d asked as he pulled Gon inside, closing the door quietly so as to not wake any of his family up, but Gon had just shook his head as if dazed. Killua dragged Gon to his room and wrapped them both in blankets and sheets like a cocoon, holding onto Gon and being held in turn, Gon’s grip on him heavy and a little bit clinging.

In the morning, Gon apologized for intruding with an abashed smile and a promise to bring Killua a chocolate bar to school next Monday, rubbing the back of his head like everything was normal. But Killua could sense something had changed, that something inside Gon had shifted like tectonic plates shifting underneath his skin: unnoticeable, but unspeakably profound.

 _I listened to you breathe like you were choking all night and you want me to pretend like everything’s normal_ , Killua thought to himself. But he smiled tightly and pretended in turn: “Yeah, you’d better get me a king-sized bar,” he’d said.

The missing person report made it onto the evening news. Killua listened to it listlessly during family dinner, moving his food around his plate without eating any of it.

 

* * *

 

Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, sometime around his sixteenth birthday Gon grows into his messy hair and his long legs and becomes popular in a different way than the kid who always got picked first for teams during gym classes. “A girl asked me out yesterday,” Gon says as they play Greed Island in Killua’s room. It’s the third time they’ve had a conversation like this in so many months.

“Eh,” Killua replies, carefully noncommittal. “Are you gonna say yes?”

Gon leans back against Killua’s bed. “Mmm… maybe if you come with me?” he says.

“Idiot. Then it’s not a date anymore,” Killua replies, mashing the buttons on his controller to kill off a few stray mooks. “If you bring me along, you’ll make her feel even worse than if you just turned her down.”

“I don’t even really know her, actually. I mean, we’ve been in a few of the same classes together, but it’s not like we’ve ever talked much, so I dunno why she even asked me out,” Gon says.

A light doesn’t know how bright it burns. Killua scoffs and presses the start button. “Yeah, what’s so great about you, anyway?” he asks, and tilts his head to meet Gon’s lips halfway.

Later, they lie on Killua’s bed together and Killua stares at the ceiling. “You should go on a date with her,” he says. He can’t tell if he’s just thinking too hard or if he’s thinking just right, but it feels like Gon knows exactly where to touch that makes Killua shiver, like buttons that turn Killua’s body into something unfamiliar to himself. He can’t tell if it’s because Gon knows what he’s doing or if it’s because Gon knows Killua, and he doesn’t know if it’d make a difference either way.

He breathes in, filling his lungs with oxygen. “Tell her from the beginning it’s just as friends. Go to a movie or something. Who knows, maybe you’ll have a good time.”

Beside him, Gon is sleeping.

 

* * *

 

In a family of eccentrics, his parents have hedged their hopes on him, he knows. _Get into a good university, Killua. Take over the family business, Killua._ The most choice that he’s getting in the matter is a choice of which Ivy League he prefers to apply to and if he’d like to go to business school or law school after getting his bachelor’s degree. The school college counselor adores him because he got perfect scores on the reading and math sections of the SAT and takes four Advanced Placement classes and he plays varsity lacrosse, but when he goes home after practice, he feels a little like an automaton.

He practices a speech over and over in his head. “Hey, Dad, I was thinking. You know that boarding school Alluka’s at? Well, there’s a college in the same town, it’s a pretty good one. It was on the list of top ten liberal arts colleges this year. If I got in, I could rent an apartment there and bring Alluka to live with me. I think she’d like that better.”

Every time he gets the opportunity for it, though, he ends up falling silent.

 

* * *

 

It’s strange how memories work. In a few years, they begin to fade, both the important and unimportant. By the time Killua graduates from college, he’ll find it difficult to remember – which came before which? The first time Gon kissed him, or the night that Kite goes missing? Peculiar, inconsequential memories remain persistent and Killua will wonder why he used up precious space that he could’ve spent on more significant moments.

But emotions – those are remembered with something deeper and more profound than the brain. Those linger in the bones. They entrench themselves into the body and burn like a low flame, slow and steady, and eases Killua’s fear that at his core there is emptiness for years and years to come.

 

* * *

 

“Can you stop doing that?” Killua asks.

Gon tilts his head. “Doing what?”

“It’s just – whenever you touch me, you keep asking over and over again if it’s alright, and then you stop there and wait for me to answer,” Killua says, turning away from Gon’s gaze, even though he can still feel it resting on the side of his face. “It’s embarrassing having to keep saying ‘yeah, keep going’ every other minute. If I didn’t want to do something, I’d say so.”

“But Killua,” Gon replies slowly, “not saying no isn’t the same thing as being okay with it.”

There’s a quiet melancholy in his voice that forces Killua to meet Gon’s eyes and before he even realizes what he’s saying, he’s already acquiesced: “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it’s not.”

It’s not until later that Killua remembers a time in elementary school, when the two of them had accidentally roughed up some other kids a little too much during recess. Kite had picked them up from detention and scruffed Gon. “You have to be more careful with friends than that, idiot,” Kite had said, ignoring Gon’s half-panicked wriggling. “Just because they didn’t say no doesn’t mean that they said yes.”

Gon went limp and nodded before Kite let him down. To Killua, though, Kite had just mussed up his hair a little. “I won’t tell your parents,” Kite had said. Almost ten years later, Killua wonders – what had Kite been thinking then?

 

* * *

 

There is any number of things that Gon might be doing during the nights he doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going to. Maybe he’s drinking, maybe he’s going to clubs armed with a fake I.D. and a youthful lack of fear. Maybe he’s going to the lake he and Kite used to fish at; Gon brought him there once before, and Killua knows the stars reflect beautifully in the water at night. Maybe he’s getting high to lose himself. Maybe he just wants to be alone with his own sadness.

Killua doesn’t think that knowing would make him feel any better when mostly he’s just scared that Gon is going somewhere he can’t follow. That makes it easier to stifle his curiosity – in the absence of knowing where Gon goes to, Killua can make any assumption his mind arbitrarily settles upon.

 

* * *

 

One way to cope is to compare. Look at him, he’s in so much more pain than you are. He was abandoned by his dad as a kid. His older brother is probably dead. True, he’s unstable now, and you’re not sure if someday soon might bring earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, but he still bears it and smiles. Who are you to be wrapped up in pain? Come on. Don’t kid yourself. You’re a rich kid with a 4.2 GPA and a college application that most admissions offices are going to cream themselves over. You don’t want to take over the family business? Wow, well, he probably didn’t want his brother to go missing. Who the fuck are you? Just sit there and bear it. He’s managing and he has far more of a right to give into misery than you.

Of course, nobody said it was a healthy coping mechanism.

 

* * *

 

Ever since the night Kite disappeared, Killua has been afraid – not that Gon is going to explode, because Killua knows instinctively it’ll happen – but that when it happens, Killua won’t be able to be there by Gon’s side, to try and hold him together, to remind him that there is at least one person who would accept every bit of him whether the pieces come broken or whole.  It’s only a matter of time before they go their separate ways, Killua off to his ivory tower and Gon to whatever horizon he decides to drift towards.

At least, that’s what he tells himself he’s afraid of. The truth is, he knows he’s really just scared that Gon never needed him to be that person.

 

* * *

 

This is how Killua will be remembered by his high school classmates: the person who was good at everything in a way that would be incredibly obnoxious were he not a generally nice person at heart. Gon’s best friend.

This is how Gon will be remembered by his high school classmates: a true ray of sunshine, the sort of person who everybody had good things to say about because his kindness was so genuine. Killua’s best friend.

This is how Killua will remember Gon: by the 2AMs they spend together – sitting on the rooftop of Gon’s house during the summers laughing and eating half-melted popsicles, feeling light and free and waiting for sunrise. Playing video games in Killua’s room and poking fun at each other for every screw-up they made. Studying together the Friday night before finals, attempting to teach Gon what the difference between covalent and ionic bonds are. Gon’s hands on his thighs and lips on the crook of his neck and Killua feeling inches from discovering some cosmic, universal truth. The night Kite went missing. The times Gon would end up at Killua’s house without explaining where he’d been and Killua would listen to the sound of him breathing until morning.

And this is how Killua will remember himself: by the 2AMs he spent alone, unable to sleep, head filled with thoughts that range from the idle to the terrible to the desperate.

 

* * *

 

Killua has always suspected that the first person he’d initiate a kiss with would be Gon, but he’d never thought that it’d go like this: after a few moments, Killua tilts his head away and feels his cheeks heat up bright red. Gon blinks once, twice. “Your lips taste bitter,” Gon says, sounding a little surprised, even as he leans in to return the kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: _I’m awake and you’re breathing._


End file.
